Privacy

Law enforcement's use of the surveillance devices known as stingrays, fake
cell towers that can intercept communications and track phones, remains as
murky as it is controversial, hidden in non-disclosure agreements and
cloak-and-dagger secrecy. But a group of Seattle researchers has found a new
method to track those trackers: by recruiting ridesharing vehicles as
surveillance devices of their own.

For two months last year, researchers at the University of Washington paid
drivers of an unidentified ridesharing service to keep custom-made sensors
in the trunks of their cars, converting those vehicles into mobile cellular
data collectors. They used the results to map out practically every cell
tower in the cities of Seattle and Milwaukee—along with at least two
anomalous transmitters they believe were likely stingrays, located at the
Seattle office of the US Customs and Immigration Service, and the
Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Tech

Lawyers,
academics, and
activists
are now questioning that reasoning.
Judicial processes are, by and large, open to the public. Judges must give
reasons for their most important actions, such as sentencing. When an
algorithmic scoring process is kept secret, it is impossible to
challenge key
aspects of it. How is the algorithm weighting different data points, and
why? Each of these inquiries is crucial to two core legal principles: due
process, and the ability to meaningfully appeal an adverse decision.

[...] So Bickel and co got to work first by text mining most of the
Facebook status updates and then data mining most of the likes data set. Any
patterns they found, they then tested by looking for people with similar
patterns in the remaining data and seeing if they also had the same level of
substance use.